This page describes the current hardware and software that Jim & Mike use to record and edit the podcasts that we produce.

Studio Hardware

Audio Technica AT-2020 Side Address Condenser Microphones While these mics are the “low end” of the Audio Technica professional line, they are many steps above most of the cheap computer microphones.  If you are not doing music, in my opinion, there is no need to go much higher than these.

M-Audio NRV10 Firewire Mixer Firewire mixers have always had one major advantage over USB ones – because of the wider channel that firewire offers, these mixers are capable of sending each audio track separately to your recording software rather than mixing them and sending a single mixed signal to your audio workstation like a USB mixer will.  We used to use a much cheaper Alesis Firewire mixer, but the power supply blew three months ago and we are still waiting for a replacement.  M-Audio is a serious audio company.  Alesis, sadly is not. The NRV10 is the cheapest Firewire mixer I could find that handles at least four XLR microphones (and it handles five)

StarTech 5C13942 Firewire Express Card While most of the computers I have owned have built-in firewire, the chipset they use tends to be lousy.  This can cause serious problems when the mixer overwhelms the capacity of the cheap firewire chipset.  The aforementioned StarTech card uses the top quality TI firewire chipset (TI along with Apple are the developers of firewire) and since it is a discrete card, it handles the audio processing without needing to rely on the computer.

Marantz PMD-660 Compact Flash Recorder No matter how good your rig is, sooner or later, your computer will lock up during a recording session.  We connect the audio out from our mixer to the audio in on this compact flash recorder and use it as a live backup.  If the computer freezes up, we still have a copy of our podcast.  This has saved our bacon more than once – particularly at least twice when we had an interview.

JK Audio Broadcast Host Digital Hybrid Phone Patch We tend to use this less and less, but sometimes you need a reliable audio patch to bring in someone who wants to call using the old telephone service.  The magic that this box offers versus a cheap $10 Radio Shack Phone patch, is that it is capable of separating the incoming and outgoing sides of a phone call so that the caller does not get feedback.  This sort of thing is absolutely essential if you plan to use a land line phone.

Remote Hardware

Marantz PMD-660 Compact Flash Recorder Same one we use in the studio.  This flash recorder also has two XLR inputs on the back that allow us to provide power to a condenser microphone.  This is far less cumbersome for field interviews than lugging a computer along.

Sennheiser MD-46 Cardioid Interview Microphone This is one of the great interview microphones.

Audio Technica AT-2020USB Condenser Microphone with built-in USB interface Both Mike and Jim use these when we record a show remote from each other.  Since we do double ending recording  – we each record ourselves and then Jim mixes the two recordings, we use these USB microphones plugged directly into our computers.  These microphones have the same pro quality sound as the regular AT2020 studio mics we use, but add a USB interface for direct PC recording.

Software

Adobe Audition 3.0.1 While we started with the free Audacity software, we quickly outgrew it.  We elected to use this software, which is the same one used by many pro radio stations.  There is a slight learning curve, but once you get past it, this is one of the easiest, powerful, and most forgiving recording and editing package available for the PC.

Levelator by Conversations Network This is a godsend piece of free software.  Very simply, it analyzes the audio in a recording mixdown and adjusts it so that all of the parties sound like they are at the same volume level.  This way, you don’t have to worry about getting your input signals from each microphone perfectly matched volume-wise.  Furthermore, it raises the volume level of the recording so that it maximized the signal to noise ratio and boosts the volume of the podcast without impacting the sound.